More Sky

Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2025

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023

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The Irish Times Book of the YearMore Sky is a remarkable and remarkably various debut collection from Eric Gregory Award winner, Joe Carrick-Varty, tracking the ways in which experience of addiction and domestic violence shape a life.Carrick-Varty approaches difficult material with great skill and poise: here we find stunning individual lyrics, with an eye for the vivid and surreal; surprising sequences which use Buddhism and Greek myth and the life of coral to refract the poems' interests; and the astonishing sixty-three page long poem 'sky doc' which meditates on suicide, and its retrospective haunting of every corner of its speaker's life.